NJIT Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences Bruce Bukiet has released his annual Major League Baseball projections and he doesn't say see good things for the Pittsburgh Pirates - the official baseball team of Science 2.0 - but at least his favorite team, the Mets, are going to stink too.
Well, in the world of Bayes projections anyway. They still have to play the games.
Bukiet's model, published in Operations Research, can be used to project the number of games a team should be expected to win, the optimal batting order for a set of 9 batters, and how trading players will likely influence a team's number of wins.
For the 2014 season, Bukiet's model pegs Boston, Detroit, and Oakland as American League Division winners, with Anaheim and Seattle narrowly edging Tampa Bay and the New York Yankees in the AL Wildcard chase. In the National League, the numbers say St. Louis, Washington, and Los Angeles will take the top spots in their respective divisions. San Francisco and Atlanta are predicted to fill the Wildcard slots.
"There are some unknowns that the model can't incorporate in projecting team win totals before the season, such as rookie performance and trades that have not yet occurred, but, sadly for my Mets, the forcasts have been very accurate," Bukiet noted - and he predicts 68 wins and a last-place finish for the Metropolitans this year so perhaps they should get an early start on that July salary dump. Bukiet's preseason expectations for the Mets have been within 3 games of the win total attained by the team in 9 of the last 10 seasons.
A listing of Bukiet's 2014 expected win totals for each MLB team can be found below, and his daily projections are posted at http://www.egrandslam.com.
National League
Washington
94
St. Louis
95
Los Angeles
95
Atlanta
90
Milwaukee
86
San Francisco
88
Philadelphia
79
Cincinnati
82
Arizona
83
Miami
69
Pittsburgh
76
San Diego
82
New York Mets
68
Chicago Cubs
57
Colorado
67
American League
Boston
96
Detroit
99
Oakland
93
Tampa Bay
86
Kansas City
82
Anaheim
87
New York Yankees
86
Cleveland
80
Seattle
87
Toronto
82
Chicago White Sox
65
Texas
85
Baltimore
73
Minnesota
63
Houston
55
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